Account Scoring Tool Helps Companies Home In on Best Targets

By Richard Adhikari
Feb 13, 2018 7:00 AM PT

DataFox last week launched Account Scoring, a new product to help businesses and financial firms find and prioritize optimum target clients.

DataFox offers clients data on more than two million companies to help them prioritize existing prospect accounts, as well as discover new companies to add to their CRM systems as potential high priorities, said CMO Mike Dorsey.

Its data stack contains information about companies, the technologies they use, and other information gleaned through media and other sources.

Insights are delivered to clients on a Software as a Service platform through application programming interfaces, or placed directly into CRM systems, spreadsheets and communication tools.

Scoring and Strategizing

The Account Scoring feature lets clients use data to create scores that rank existing customers and targets in terms of their potential, and to plan followup actions. Users assign weights and criteria to the data points most important to them.

"Now, with the introduction of Account Scoring, companies can leverage not only DataFox-sourced company data, but also their own data, by importing company prospect spreadsheets and ingesting their CRM account lists via our Salesforce integration," Dorsey told CRM Buyer.

Combining both data sets lets clients "build even more robust account prioritization models without the painful data grunt work that's normally required to do these analyses."

The scoring model is applied to all the two million-plus companies in DataFox's database. Customers can use the company's search engine to find the top targets not already on their list and add them into their CRM systems and sales and marketing strategies.

System Instills Trust

"Senior executives in sales and marketing are strategic thinkers, and we arm them with the tools to encode their strategy into the scores," he explained.

Providing a transparent system that shows the underlying math of the scoring system and reasons why an account is ranked the way it is "inspires trust and arms reps with timely and relevant messaging," Dorsey said. This creates trust and further drives adoption, which in turn leads to greater conviction, efficiency and alignment.

Transparency "is important for all AI-driven solutions in the sales space for credibility and user confidence in recommendations," noted Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

"It's interesting that [DataFox] comes from the financial analyst world, where quickly surfacing and acting on final data is key to staying ahead of financial valuations," she told CRM Buyer.

Customization Is Key

The Account Scoring tool "is similar to lookalike modeling in the B2C world. Take the profile of the best customers for a company and find other similar prospects," observed Cindy Zhou, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Different companies value different attributes, so "having the ability to customize scoring methodology is important," she told CRM Buyer.

"Having an account scoring offering enables DataFox to be competitive and demonstrates support of the Account-Based Strategy model," she noted.

Account-based marketing is the current trend in marketing.

Marketers "frequently need help building account scoring models so vendors that help proactively surface insights for them are welcomed," Zhou pointed out.

The Value of DataFox's Data Stack

"Many CRM providers today provide some type of data enrichment within their product or through partners for lead scoring," Nucleus' Wettemann pointed out.

"DataFox is unique in that it combines AI with its own human verification as well as feedback and input from end users, bringing together the power of data science and crowdsourcing."

Further, DataFox's data stack "is focused on whitespace analysis, where fewer CRM products provide capabilities today," Wettemann noted. "Most data enrichment focuses on existing contacts or companies within CRM systems for sales, not at the top of the funnel."

Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.